Dancing on a tightrope: young dancers creating independent work for Fringe

‘An eerie yet beautifully complex and meditative sensorial experience’, promises the blurb of Dunes Rolling Down Dunes for this year’s Melbourne Fringe Festival. The show is the creation of emerging Melbourne-based dancer and choreographer, Benjamin Hurley.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the arts budget has been cut by 19% overall in Australia over 2022-2023, when compared with the previous two years. The undervaluing of arts spending in national budgets of course is part of a longer history of neoliberalism. Yet, now more than ever, we need to be supporting emerging artists.